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Whether they’re designing eco-homes or a new mass transit system, entrepreneurs are finding virtual worlds provide them with an inexpensive, low-risk launching pad Robert Curet, the owner of Little Wonder Studio in Burbank, Calif., has all the high-powered software you’d expect a modern toy developer to use: Rhino 4.0 for industrial modeling, Autodesk 3ds Max for animation, ZBrush for digital sculpting, and Maxon Cinema 4D for graphics, for starters. But one of his most recent creations didn’t require any of them. Instead, Curet turned to the free tools available in the virtual world called Second Life, sketching out a model and mechanisms for a windup toy and making a rough estimate of the size of the parts. “It took me about half an hour to create the 3D model, where it would have taken me a week to do it before,” says Curet. In the next hour and a half he took some pictures of the model, cleaned them up in Photoshop (ADBE), and sent them on to a factory in Hong Kong.

Soon he was meeting an engineer from the factory in Second Life, answering questions about the toy while the two men—each represented by animated avatars—looked at the virtual model, rotated it, and took it apart piece by piece. After that meeting the engineer was able to fabricate a real model and give Curet an accurate estimate of how much the toy would cost to manufacture.

The result: Noggin Bops, plastic windup toys that shimmy side to side while bopping their heads. In January, Curet sold the license to make and distribute the toys to California Creations in Tustin, Calif. Curet is sold on working in Second Life. “It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s social,” he says. “It allows you to work quickly and answer tons of questions about your design in three dimensions that you wouldn’t be able to answer as well by drawing it out on a board.”

Virtual worlds, of which Second Life is the most populous, are becoming more than just a place where Web surfers socialize, play games, or sell nonexistent products to imaginary people. Increasingly, tech-savvy businesses are using virtual worlds to design, create, and even test product concepts before they make their debut in the real world.

`OPEN TO EVERYONE’

Already, larger firms have made news with their forays into virtual worlds, particularly Starwood Hotels & Resorts (HOT), which tested a new hotel concept called Aloft. After a trial in Second Life, Starwood decided to put more seating in the lobby and install radios in the shower, among other changes.

The crucial advantage to working in virtual worlds is that they offer much more potential for customers to interact with new products, even ones that don’t exist yet, says Brian Mennecke, associate professor in information management systems at Iowa State University. The cost of entry is low, too. “It’s open to everyone from day one,” says Paul Jackson, principal analyst with technology researcher Forrester Research (FORR). In a report that was co-authored by Jackson and released earlier this year, Jackson points out that, even with collaboration software, sharing 3D or CAD models “has proven tricky, especially when much of the required data lives in proprietary design systems.” Working in virtual worlds helps solve that problem.

Curet is a fan of Second Life because it saved him time and money and made it easier to meet with his engineer in China. But other businesses are using Second Life to offer services not readily available in the real world or to build products they couldn’t otherwise afford to prototype. And some entrepreneurs are using Second Life to test ideas—such as a mass transit system with individual pods for riders—that aren’t feasible to prototype any other way.

TRANSPORTING CUSTOMERS

Second Life has its drawbacks, of course. Some find its design tools too crude for their purposes. “The level of detail may not be there if you want to design a microprocessor or the details of an engine, for example,” says Fred Fuchs, owner of FireSabre Consulting, which provides services for people who want to do business in Second Life. There are privacy and security concerns. It can be difficult to translate ideas developed in Second Life into more mainstream design software. And it can be especially tough to get a sense of scale in Second Life, because avatars come in all different sizes. But entrepreneurs experimenting with Second Life insist that the prototyping possibilities and ease of collaboration it offers just aren’t available anywhere else.

Crescendo Design, a husband-and-wife architecture firm focusing on environmentally friendly designs, has built dozens of models for its clients. They’re mostly of cardboard, and they take about three days and $600 to complete. Once finished, it’s hard to make changes without taking an X-Acto knife to the whole thing. To see them, clients must visit Crescendo’s offices, or someone from Crescendo has to come see them. But the firm is based in Madison, Wis., and its clients are scattered throughout the Midwest. “We were driving a lot to get to clients and show them designs,” says co-owner Jon Brouchoud. “Driving so many miles to build an environmentally sound home was counterintuitive.”

So Brouchoud and partner Kandy Jentz-Brouchoud began meeting with clients in Second Life, where they can not only view plans for homes but also walk through lifelike 3D models. “We can invite clients inside the design concept instead of just showing them two-dimensional drawings,” Brouchoud says. “It gives customers a whole new kind of visualization. There’s nothing like being able to walk into what could be your home.” Making changes is a whole lot easier, too. Moving a kitchen to gain a southern exposure or putting a stairwell in a more convenient location can be accomplished in just a few minutes. Brouchoud can even incorporate indigenous species into the landscaping and account for the exact topography of the building site. “Second Life has transformed the way I think about design,” says Brouchoud. “Even though I can pen-and-ink a design I come up with, I often find myself jumping into Second Life to model it…. The designs are free, and it takes half the time to make the models with the in-world set of building tools.” While there is architecture software that lets him make 3D models, they don’t allow him to visit with multiple people “inside” the models, and they’re not free.

If you have ever given any thought to how to maximize the free traffic coming to your website by using search engine optimization techniques, I have a question for you. Have you ever paused to question just why it is that certain websites can position themselves so that they achieve the outstanding search engine results that they do?

That is, imagine that you are searching for a product related to diabetes. So, you punch in ‘diabetes’ to the Google search box, and see that there are nearly 76 million results shown at the top of the page.

However, the simple fact is that there are only 10 results, out of all those millions shown on the page in front of you. Now, if you imagine that your travel site was to be one of the top 10 results, then it is very easy to see how many thousands of new visitors this could send to your own site.

Even having your website appear on the second page of Google’s results would still generate lots of visitors for you, as evidence shows that people who are genuinely searching for quality information will often look at least as far as the second page.

Unfortunately, even these relatively dedicated searchers will probably stop there, and so, if your or site or blog is rated somewhere lower down the top hundred, then you are likely to see very, very few free visitors coming from the search engine results.

Now, take this analogy one stage further and imagine that your site appeared on the first page of every major search engine results for online dating. In this situation, it will be almost impossible not to earn substantial revenues through your site simply because of the number of visitors who were dropping by your site every day.

Indeed, in such a situation, it will be almost impossible not to see a spike in your site earnings and you could view those increases as representing almost pure profit, as the upturn in visitor numbers has been created almost entirely without cost.

No matter what your business, this situation is the dream of anybody trying to sell products or services online.

It is not, however, a vision that is impossible to turn into reality. It does not need any special skills or talents to achieve these kinds of results, nor does it cost money either.

You should, however, avoid wasting money on ‘instant success’ products that promise to skyrocket your site to top-10 search engine results almost overnight. Do not be tempted to spend your hard earned money unnecessarily in this way.

Unfortunately, in their eagerness to see their website ranked this highly, many marketers will buy these books, and resort to using tricks and underhand tactics to try to achieve this as quickly as possible. Do not do it. It is absolutely not necessary, and doing so could get your website blacklisted or even banned entirely.

If, however, you know the correct techniques to apply then driving free traffic to your web site by using what are known as search engine optimization techniques is not that difficult. Also, because these techniques are completely ‘white hat’ for the search engines, such methods of web site promotion achieve longer-term results as well.

Put another way, using the correct methods will provide your site with a naturally increasing stream of visitors, but, of course, there can be no guarantee that you always maintain your top-10 position without further efforts.

Until quite recently, search engine optimization was the number one method for driving new visitors to your website without paying for them.

It is fair to say that this is no longer the case, as other traffic generation methods are now equally as effective as search engine optimization tactics. Nevertheless, this is not an excuse to skimp on the efforts necessary to make sure that your site is fully optimized, especially as it should take no more than an hour or two to do so.

And, please, forget any secret formulas all magic systems for search engine optimization. No such thing exists, unfortunately, and, even if they did it is unlikely that it would be worth paying to find out about them. Search engine optimization is a relatively straightforward and simple operation, but it is something that needs to be done properly from the beginning if you seriously hope to achieve sustainable top-10 results with Google, Yahoo or MSN.

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.

About WordPress.org

On this site you can download and install a software script called WordPress. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a service called WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in seconds, but varies in several ways and is less flexible than the WordPress you download and install yourself.

A Little History

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.

2005 was a very exciting year for WordPress, as it saw the release of our 1.5 version (introduced themes) which was downloaded over 900,000 times, the start of hosted service WordPress.com to expand WP’s reach, the founding of Automattic by several core members of the WP team, and finally the release of version 2.0.

After 1.5 we seemed to have something people really liked and we’ve experienced some fairly rapid growth. Here are some metrics for 2006 and 2007.

In 2006 we had 1,545,703 downloads, in 2007 we had 3,816,965!

As for plugins we had 191,567 downloads of 371 unique plugins in 2006. In 2007 there were 2,845,884 downloads (15x growth) of 1,384 plugins.

This page answers the question: What is AdSense?

Google’s AdSense is perhaps the fastest and easiest way to generate revenue from a website that contains great content.

If you’d like to see an example of Google AdSense in action, visit this page about what is the best day to purchase a cars. On the left side of the page, you’ll see “Ads by Google” followed by one to five text-based ads. The ads themselves are called “Google AdWords,” and the program that lets publishers display them on their site is called “Google AdSense.”

Here is how Google answers the question — what is AdSense — in its FAQ (frequently asked questions):

” Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant, un-obtrusive Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages.

“The program is free, and combines pay-per-click and pay-per-impression advertising – meaning you get paid for valid clicks on the ads on your site or search results pages as well as impressions on your content pages. So go ahead and try this program.”

What is AdSense: A Brief History

Google AdSense is an outrgrowth of the Google Content-Targeted Advertising program that was launched in early March 2003.

This early program let large websites integrate Google AdWords into their websites. Each deal was independently negotiated with Google, and sites with less than 20 million page views couldn’t participate.

The Google AdSense program lets much smaller websites play. Even if your site only gets a few hundred page views per month, you can now apply to the AdSense program.

You would probably like to download a free PSP theme. Virtually all PSP users do. The PSP has become an incredibly well known, and well loved, machine, and part of that is the flexibility it affords its users. Ipod socks are totally superfluous when you have the freedom to choose the exact way your PSP looks and behaves!

Download A Free PSP Theme Tip 1-Don’t use the main Sony site!
A lot of people never bother to look beyond the main Sony Playstation website when they are looking for themes for their PSP. It is virtually impossible to find a unique PSP Theme if you are downloading it from the same place as everybody else. Although there is no shortage of themes to choose from on the main site, there are a lot of people choosing them. Look somewhere else!

Download A Free PSP Theme Tip 2- Do an internet search
A lot of people will use the main search engines to find out how to download a free PSP theme, but use a bit of clever thinking, and you can get what you want. Instead of doing a direct search engine search for themes, look for PSP communities on the internet? Try to see if you can find some forums or newsgroups. This can be a really useful source of resources, sometimes from members of the forum, and sometimes just from threads. You can find custom-made PSP Themes on these dedicated forums.

Download A Free PSP Theme Tip 3- Don’t use a download!
You can try using one of the simple art programs on your computer to design your own original Theme. Virtually any of the simple art programs will allow you to produce a simple wallpaper, and this should be compatible with your PSP as long as you create it as a JPEG file. Another possibility is to get someone who is good with art to actually design a theme for you. You can find a PSP forum which has some decent Themes, and ask whoever designed the themes you like the best if they will create one for you. Often they will be happy to do it, although they may charge you a little for doing the job.

You can do a lot more with downloading free PSP Themes than just following everybody else with EA games wallpapers etc from the official Sony site. Be original, and you will enjoy your PSP more!